It was announced today that SpringSource is acquiring Covalent. For those who are not interested in the happenings in the technology space, no reason to read further. For those that are, this is BIG news.

For those not familiar with Covalent, they are the commercial entity behind several Apache projects, Apache Web Server being the most notable. Although not as flamboyant as other open source business, they are THE guys you would want to go to for Apache Web Server support. Heck, they are the guys that JBoss partnered with so can include Apache Web Server support alongside Tomcat and JBoss support.

To me, this acquisition signals intent to broaden the reach of SpringSource towards being the source for a larger stack. So compared to the much talked about LAMP stack (i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL, Php/Perl), another popular stack is LAMJ (i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL, Java). Spring is already well positioned to be a top provider of the “J” in the stack and now the “A” as well.